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Polgar Responds on Her Blog; Texas Tech Voices Its Support

Under the headline, “Stating the Fact,” Susan Polgar has posted a long comment on her blog in which she says that the lawsuit and allegations against her and Paul Truong, her husband, are the actions of a group of “small minded people will do everything to protect the status quo.” She adds, “Due to the legal situation, I cannot go into details. But once the legal issues are over, I will speak out about this extensively.” Here is her entire statement.

When I ran for the USCF Executive Board, threats were made toward me and my family unless I dropped out from the election. I refused and the members spoke up overwhelmingly. After I took office, more threats including blackmail were made toward me to resign from the board. They said that if I did not resign, they will contact Texas Tech University to try to get me fired and they will do everything possible to destroy me and my family.

This group of small minded people will do everything to protect the status quo. If they can do this to me, imagine what they will do to others who do not have a voice or a forum to speak out. I have been publicly called by 4-letter words, female body parts, and more. I have been screamed and cussed at on the phone. This is the kind of abuse one can face by going up against the establishment. And this is only a small part of I have to go through. It seems like chapters in a bad novel but unfortunately, it is a reality.

In the past few months, various people have lobbied to have the Susan Polgar National Invitational for Girls cancelled. They want to destroy all my efforts to promote chess for young people, especially girls. They want me to stop finding better opportunities for our professional players. They have no concern about the growth of College Chess. They could not care less about doing the right things for our game. Our professionals are struggling. Our young players are still dropping out at a high rate. We still have done nothing to look for sponsorships and expansion. We, as a federation, are not doing enough to positively promote the USCF.

In the last few weeks, false posts were made and rumors were spread that Texas Tech University has withdrawn support of scholarships and the Susan Polgar Foundation has canceled all tournaments including the upcoming Reshevsky Memorial, the Susan Polgar National Open for Girls, Boys and International Open (where we are giving out over $100,000 in scholarships, laptop computers and cash and chess prizes, etc.) as well as the Susan Polgar World Open Championship for Girls and Boys, all without making a penny for myself. In fact, I have to put in my own time, effort and money.

The same people also tried to spread more lies by saying that my husband and I have resigned from the USCF Executive Board. Some confidential correspondence between board members was leaked out to the same group of people. I have saved every email and post. Everything will be introduced in due time.

There is not an ounce of truth to these vicious rumors. I am not resigning and I have no intention of resigning. I intend to fight this all the way. This is why I ran for the board. Due to the legal situation, I cannot go into details. But once the legal issues are over, I will speak out about this extensively. Now that I am on the USCF Executive Board, I finally understand the real problem behind the scene, things that most members are not aware of.

Thank you for your supporting posts, emails and phone calls. I am not a quitter. I made a promise to the USCF voters when I announced my candidacy 11 months ago and I intend to keep my promise. We all deserve better.

In an interview, Jim Brink, the vice provost for academic affairs at Texas Tech, said that the university stood behind Ms. Polgar and Mr. Truong, who are employees, not faculty members, of the university. “We have the greatest confidence in both Susan and Paul and in the reasons that we hired them,” Mr. Brink said. “Nothing has changed as a result of the suit.” He said that there will be a campus-wide reception on Nov. 1 to “introduce them to the university and the wider community.”

Referring to the lawsuit, which names Texas Tech as a defendent, Mr. Brink said that it was not possible that the university’s computers could have been identified as the source for fake postings on the Internet, the charge in the lawsuit by Samuel H. Sloan, because the university’s IP addresses are constantly changing.

Mr. Brink added that he did not believe that Mr. Truong could have posted thousands of fake messages, as is alleged in the lawsuit. “Given the volume that Sloan has accused him of producing, he would have little else to do and I can assure you that he is plenty busy,” said Mr. Brink.

“Mr. Brink said that it was not possible that the university’s computers could have been identified as the source for fake postings on the Internet, the charge in the lawsuit by Samuel H. Sloan, because the university’s IP addresses are constantly changing.”

However, this is not correct. What follows are three logins by “ChessPromotion” which is the USER ID of Paul Truong on the morning of September 17, 2007. Two of them are from IP addresses assigned to Texas Tech University.

To verify this go to //www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp check the box for IP address and enter 129.118.87.222 which is the IP address for the first login. You will see that it says OrgName: Texas Tech University
OrgID: TTU-1
Address: Telecommunications Department

The third IP below is 75.111.194.9 which is a Suddenlink address which services Lubbock Texas.

In short, if Mr. Brink really believes that these logins were not by Paul Truong, he had better start searching his campus to locate the computers from which these logins were made and find out who was using them on that date.

Although the civil suit by Mr. Sloan has gotten the headlines, the internal investigation being conducted by the USCF’s Executive Board may end up having more impact on events. The Board has retained a respected law firm with Internet law specialization, and is now in the process of selecting experts who will review the methods and findings of the “Mottershead Report”.

This report, written by Brian Mottershead, a volunteer website administrator for the USCF, concluded that Executive Board member Paul Truong was responsible for over 2600 offensive USENET posts under pseudonyms including other people’s names over a period of years; it served as the primary factual basis of Mr. Sloan’s lawsuit.

Randy Bauer, USCF Vice President for Finance, has acted as the public spokesperson for the board in these matters. Mr. Bauer was endorsed by GM Susan Polgar in the spring election campaign, has previously served on the USCF board, and has won the respect of many on all sides of these disputes for his balanced and independent approach.

If the internal investigation upholds the conclusions of the Report, this evidence might be sufficient to lead the USCF’s Ethics Committee to recommend that Mr. Truong face a recall election.

The findings of Brian Mottershead were communicated privately to USCF President Bill Goichberg on or about September 20, 2007. It was only after a week had passed and Mr. Goichberg had refused to take any action at all that Mr. Mottershead posted his findings on the USCF members forum.

Now a full month has passed and the board is still “searching” for an “expert” to review the findings. Since the telephone book is filled with experts, one suspects that this stonewall is just part of the cover-up.

This is not a secret and to the contrary I have advertised this and told as many people about it as I can. That indeed is the reason why I have set up a website in the first place.

On October 9, 1990, my daughter Shamema was kidnapped away from my home in the United Arab Emirates by members of a religious group in Lynchburg Virginia affiliated with Jerry Falwell. The mother of Shamema is a Pakistani living in Chitral, Pakistan and had nothing to do with this kidnapping or with the people who kidnapped her.

When I travelled from the United Arab Emirates to Lynchburg Virginia to recover my kidnapped daughter, I was immediately arrested and charged with “attempted abduction” for trying to get my kidnapped daughter back.

Mr Sloan can’t blame any of the ‘fake sam sloan’ usenet posts as a reason for his loss in the election. One only has to go to his website to see the tasteless material there. His constant spamming of usenet has been going on for years, so much so that most people have added him to their ‘twit filter’. I would vote for a post with a wig before I would vote for Mr Sloan and I certainly wouldn’t let him near my children after seeing ‘pokemon porn’ posted on his website.

I think that we have all had enough of this endless Pilgar-Sloan-Truong childish name-calling, he-said she-said tabloid gossip.

The crucial question is: Did Paul Truong and likewise Susan Polgar commit or sonspire to commit the actions outlined in the Mottershead report. And if so, is this in violation of the USCF Code of Ethics, and Code of Conduct for USCF Executive Board members?

Certainly the allegations are tabloid-worthy. And from my non-member’s perspective, they sure sound like Code of Conduct violations. (I believe that the Ethics Committee wishes to limit its scope to actions at/around the chess board.) And if any current Board member(s) performed the alleged acts, he and/or she would do best to resign immediately. I have said more along these lines here & elsewhere.

But Mr. Adams’s frame would omit much (just as this blog’s coverage of Mr. Sloan’s lawsuit omits much…):

– Was the data mining performed by Messrs. Mottershead and Bogner in violation of their USCF contract, and was USCF members’ privacy violated?

– How did former USCF President Leroy Dubeck come to endorse the, er, colorful Mr. Sloan in 2006? That’s a charming story in itself, and does much to explain the shameful culture of USCF….

– Irony aside, given that Mr. Truong & Ms. Polgar ran a reformist campaign (“clean up the USCF”), isn’t the timing a bit suspicious? You’d think this was a Teamsters or UMW election–I’m originally from the anthracite region, so Jock Yablonski //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Yablonski comes to mind ;-)

– When it comes to presenting our game to the public, why are we chess players so stupid? (There is a lot of money in the scholastic market, done right–there seems to be a lot of effort put into keeping USCF out of this market.) And so careless of our public image?

– Irony aside, given that Mr. Truong & Ms. Polgar ran a reformist campaign (”clean up the USCF”), isn’t the timing a bit suspicious? You’d think this was a Teamsters or UMW election–I’m originally from the anthracite region, so Jock Yablonski //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Yablonski comes to mind ;-)

Thank you Bill Brock (who is a defendant in my lawsuit and I have rarely had occasion to thank him for anything) because the examples of the United Mine Workers and the Teamsters Union are exactly what I had in mine when I filed my lawsuit to overturn the election results.

Of course, our case is not so extreme as those cases, as us chess players are not going to go around killing each other, but the legal principles are the same or similar. Polgar and Truong ran for election on a reformist campaign to “clean up the USCF” and “save the children”. They wanted to “save the children” from me, of all people. (I have eight children.) Now it turns out that to win this election they wrote 2463 obscene emails and newsgroup postings, all supposedly signed by me. (By the way, Polgar would have been elected no matter what but Truong squeaked in by a bare margin.) Not only did the USCF members not know about this but the members did not even know that they were married to each other, a fact that was uncovered by their election opponents just before the vote count. This organization has 86,000 members and represents the USA Internationally. I believe that there is enough here for the Department of Justice to come in, to overturn the election results, and to have a fair new election.

This whole thing is getting blown out of proportion. Granted, Sam Sloan was not popular with certain elements in the establishment. Also, granted, chess politics is shadier than a con man
eating dinner at a seafood restaurant. However, it seems to me that an independent investigator from outside chess culture, such as a newspaper, might
be better qualified to get to the facts of the case.

One does not need to be a rocket scientist to see it as the classic he-said she-said type of thing.
I would then suggest an impartial inquiry into the facts of the case, the sooner the better. Then we can all rest easy, knowing case has been taken care of.

I’m happy Texas Tech is standing by Truong, because really, even if he is the “fake Sam Sloan,” he was giving Sloan everything he deserves, and everyone knows it. I’m glad someone finally tweaked him. Truong has earned a few “attaboys” for giving Sloan some of his own medicine, and he probably deserves a USCF medal as well. It is far better for the board and the USCF to have Truong than Sloan. Those “fake Sam Sloan” posts had no influence on the election. Truong was elected fairly just like the others and Sloan was slam dunked by the voters who finally learned what he is and voted accordingly. Sloan’s phony link between the election and the internet posts is his way of trying to save face and get his revenge against two people he hates pathalogically. He was thrown out on his ear by the voters and that’s what he deserved. His own obscene website no doubt played a deciding role in his exit. The outcome is in the favor of all chessplayers.

I am not sure that I as a USCF member care two whoops in a hollow whether Paul Truong is guilty of malicious, falsely identified bulletin board posts about Mr. Sloan. I grant that these alleged deeds are bad, but I fail to see that they are material to the outcome of the recent UCSF Executive Board election. Since they are not, it seems to me that a perfectly reasonable reaction to Mr. Sloan’s accusations is, “So what?” Since when is being an malicious S.O.B. a barrier to being a USCF Board member? We elect these people for their ability to promote chess and to uphold the interests of the Federation, not for being jolly nice fellows.

If Mr. Sloan believes he was injured by the alleged misdeeds of Mr. Truong, let him by all means seek civil redress, >but not involve the federation

Board member Randy Hough won an award from the Chess Journalists of America for the “best humorous article” for writing what was essentially an attack piece on Sam Sloan.

There is one significant quote, where Hough writes, “I kept thinking of the one Board member who, after wasting an inordinate amount of our time …. asking us to use USCF money to track down someone who was impersonating him on the Internet …”

In fact, Sam Sloan did repeatedly ask the board to find out who the Fake Sam Sloan was. Whether this would have cost the USCF any money is questionable, since Mike Nolan could easily have done so as part of his regular duties in 2006, using the same techniques that Brian Motteshead finally used in September 2007 to identify Paul Truong as the perp.

Now that Paul Truong has been elected to the board and in view of the fact that he without doubt would not have been elected had he been identified as the Fake Sam Sloan before the election, one wonders how much money the USCF really saved by not identifying the person who, back in 2006, was impersonating a board member thousands of times, a subject about which the board should have been legitimately concerned.

Would it not have been better to identify the perp any time in 2006 or in early 2007, which would have prevented this person from being elected to the board and thus saved the USCF the attorneys fees and other consequences from having to defend this lawsuit? Does the membership of the Chess Journalist of America still find it to be humorous that the board ignored the repeated demands of Sam Sloan that the board take steps to identify the person who was impersonating a fellow board member?

The full text of the article that won the Chess Journalists of America award as best humorous article for 2006-07 is on the Personal Website of Randy Hough at

The comments on the above blog show “anonymous” posters encouraging Susan Polgar to file a lawsuit against Bill Goichberg and possibly the USCF. One should be aware of the fact that Susan actively moderates her blog and no posting can appear there without her permission. Thus, a stream of letters on her blog egging her on to file a suit has to mean that she is actively considering or actively threatening doing this.

Here are some of the comments on her blog in the last day:

Anonymous said…

I agree with Susan about Bill Goichberg. It’s a serious conflict of interest to run the USCF and CCA at once. But this is the history of Bill going back for many years.

I’m also interested to know how much has the uscf wasted for this latest Sam Sloan’s disgraceful lawsuit?

We know $15K for the internet insurance is correct. That was mentioned by Channing. We also know the deductible is $10K. So the question is how much more?

Sunday, December 02, 2007 9:20:00 PM

Paul said…

I can’t find polite words strong enough to reflect how sickened I am over the recent activities of crowd that now infests r.g.c.p.

These people seem to be willing to bring the USCF to a complete halt to satisfy their personal agendas. And the head rabble-rouser is a person who had run for office. His current actives clearly reflect his commitment to the members of the USCF.

Monday, December 03, 2007 11:29:00 AM

Another USCF Lifer said…

You should have left the comment from that idiot on to show the chess community how these people operate. Don’t give up Susan. Continue your fight. We’re behind you all the way.

Monday, December 03, 2007 1:33:00 PM

Sick of the USCF said…

Slap a couple multimillion dollar lawsuits on Goichberg and his gang and they’ll never pull crap like this again. You should never give in to any of them. There are enough things in writing out there that you can nail them on. Susan, fight for all of us. Otehrwise, things will never get better.

Monday, December 03, 2007 8:19:00 PM

Loves chess more than life said…

Create a fund to go after these destroyers of chess! I will send the first $100 !!!

I have just discovered on the website of the San Francisco Superior Court that a new lawsuit has been filed. This one is entitled USCF and Randall Hough vs. Gregory Alexander and Susan Polgar plus Does 1-10.

The suit was filed yesterday, October 24, 2008, and I understand that Susan Polgar was served the same day while she was giving a chess exhibition in Fresno California. This will make it for her much more difficult to evade the long arm of the law, as she had been doing thus far in the proceedings filed in Texas.

From the timing, it seems to me likely that this was done in such a way as to catch her off guard. It was known that she was going to be in California yesterday, so that by filing the new complaint yesterday she would not be aware that she was about to be served.

Even though I am not a party I can just about tell you what the case is about. It has long been suspected that Susan Polgar with the help of Gregory Alexander has been hacking into the Internet accounts of other board members including Randall Hough. What obviously must have happened is that they have developed the proof that Polgar and Alexander did this.

It is noteworthy that Paul Truong is not named as a defendant. This may simply mean that they have no proof that Truong is involved.

The information about this new case is available on the website of the San Francisco Superior Court.
Case Number Case Number: CGC-08-476777

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In its 1,500-year history, chess has imbedded itself in the world's culture and vocabulary. Ideas, terms and images from the game have long been used as proxies for intelligence and complexity. But chess is more than a diversion. Thousands worldwide play professionally or earn a living by teaching it to children. The Internet has transformed the game, making it easy for players anywhere to find an opponent day or night. Chess computers, originally developed to test the bounds of artificial intelligence, now play better than grandmasters. This blog will cover tournaments and events, trends and developments. Reader comments and questions will be more than welcome.

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